Diana and I have had many kind and concerned friends email us recently regarding the public launch of engage.com and the quickly rising popularity of meetup.com. Since we’ve been pretty stealthy until now about what MIXTT is, exactly, it’s understandable that people are wondering if we have two very similar and threatening competitors in our midst. I am stoked to have friends that care enough to bother emailing me about this stuff and love when people send me pertinent pieces of industry news – so please, keep it coming! I want to address these concerns for ourselves, our prospective investors, and most importantly, prospective users who may be wondering why they should sign up for MIXTT as opposed or in addition to the other two. Here’s why: While these two sites fall into a space that might be similarly termed to our own (e.g., social dating, group dating, social meetup), they’re both based on very different concepts, and lead to very different offline situations. At Engage, you sign up, try to get as many of your friends as possible to sign up too, and then start playing matchmaker to arrange one-on-one dates on their behalf. In my opinion, it’s still a blind date, and it’s still awkward. Only, your friend told you whom to go on it with instead of you picking out the person yourself. And that latter idea, I actually like – sometimes we overlook the opportunities that might be best for us, and I believe in trusting your friends a bit when it comes to romantic arrangements. But MIXTT enables this to happen sans the awkwardness and pressure of Engage. At MIXTT, you sign up, invite your friends to join you, plan to go out, and coordinate with another group of friends to meet up somewhere. It’s cool, casual, and laid-back. Meetup.com is awesome but has nothing to do with dating at all. It’s a central hub to organize activities/events/hang-outs with typically large groups of people who have similar interests. Personally, I’ve benefited from a Spanish Language Practice meetup and a Tech Entrepreneurs meetup, each of which had at least forty attendees. So, I am by no means trying to shoot down either of these sites – but wanted to express that there is significant differentiation between us and them. Last week, Diana brilliantly repossessed a P. Diddy line to make it our catch phrase: “Your friends can get with my friends, and we can be friends.” That is really what MIXTT is all about.